Co-op Work Term: SAP

During my time at university I have had the chance to do a couple of Co-op work terms. Last year, for my second and third work terms, I worked at SAP for eight months. I worked as a software test automation developer. SAP is the worlds largest developer of enterprise software, and one of their more well known products is Crystal Reports.

My job started with me running manual tests of the companies installers on a daily basis. Testing that each product installed correctly on each supported operating system. Gradually I started the process of automating these manual tests. It became more interesting when I became responsible for talking with developers and trying to develop more comprehensive test cases. I was basically working on my own small team project, with one other co-op student, and as a result I was able to experience a complete development cycle. The cycle started with me gathering requirements from the other developers. Next I designed test cases to meet these requirements. Then I implemented the test automation for each test case. Lastly, I was responsible for maintaining the test cases and fixing them when the broke.

I found this to be an interesting experience. The most challenging part was the amount of multi-tasking that was required, and more importantly, discovering that I am not very good at multitasking. Everyday I would have about 50-80 tasks that I had to run, each one ran for about an hour, then I had to check the results and start another task running on that machine, and finally check the result when it finished. At the same time I had a long list of improvements that I was making to the system. So I would constantly be switching from one task to another, and occasionally when I found a bug I had to report it. Then about an hour or two later someone would come by and ask about the bug, and I would have to sit there for a minute and try to remember which task they were talking about. That was a stressful experience.

Despite the difficulty I did enjoy some things about my co-op term. The office was right downtown, which was an interesting experience for me since I do not often go downtown. Also, some of the people I was working with were really fun. Occasionally we would play a game of Pool or Foosball when working was getting particularly stressful. I remember often going out for lunch with one or two of the other co-ops I was working with. There are a lot of great places to go for lunch downtown, that is something I really miss, especially the butter chicken place across the street. But maybe I am getting a bit off topic.

The work I was doing might have been a bit boring, and not really what I had expected, but I think I learned a lot from the experience, like improving some of my non-technical skills. I had a chance to practice my public speaking when I gave tutorials for other testers on how to create automated test cases using the new software. It also gave me a perspective of what it is like to work at a big company, and particularly a company that does something that I do not know a lot about. I also was able to get a glimpse of other peoples jobs to give me some idea of what I can work towards after I finish university.